RealVision in Retail Technology

To continue on where we left off, Twitter is becoming more and more useful for not just sharing what you or your business is doing, but also for “listening” to what your customers or other businesses are saying. A very useful tool for gathering feedback, spotting trends or just learning about something.

On our ZipTV networks we’re now displaying the latest Twitter updates on the screens. By allowing multiple businesses to update say, the Twitter account ‘ZipTVCleveland’, we can broadcast messages from multiple sources to the public. So the owner of the local Salon can tell people what offers are available today, the local Takeaway store can remind us of their hard to beat prices and Pub on the main street can remind us who’s playing tonight.

Each business can elect to post their message through the ZipTV website or if they prefer via text message on their phone, making it easier than ever to communicate to potential customers.

Ok, so I think by now everyone has heard of ‘Twitter’. Although I’m not sure if everyone actually knows what it is. So let me try to explain what Twitter is…..

It’s a website where people can type a few sentences to describe what they’re doing or what thoughts they’d like to share. The only catch is the entry has to be 140 characters or less. You can however enter as many entries as you like. Once you enter some text, other people who are also using the website and are ‘following’ you can see your latest updates. What do I mean by ‘following?’. Well, in order to see what someone else has written you need to tell the system you want to ‘follow’ them, that way any updates that person enters you’ll see on the screen whenever you’re logged on to Twitter.

So that’s pretty much it. It sounds so simple, and that’s because it is, yet it’s become a worldwide hit. Twitter has introduced the capability to communicate to the masses, instantly and inexpensively. It’s attracted millions of users all over the world, mainly because it provides people access to hearing what their favourite celebrities, politicians and friends have to say. That is of course they actually ’say’ something.

So my attention turns to retail businesses and what opportunities Twitter brings to retailers. The first that springs to mind is the ability to inform loyal customers of promotions. Imagine you realised you had a whole of stock you needed to sell quickly in order to make room for the new range coming in, maybe a simple Twitter entry telling people “it’s buy one get on free today” will get customers running to the door.

Another example might be informing your customers of new stock that’s just arrived. Although Twitter doesn’t currently allow you to upload pictures, you can add ‘links’ to other websites where the images of your stock might be stored.

So I actually think that Twittering is a good way to communicate to your customers. The challenge is to make sure people know that you’re on Twitter and that they’re following you so they don’t miss out on any fantastic bargains!

The other day my wife and I purchased a book of vouchers called ‘The Entertainer’. This is a book that is put together each year by contributing businesses in Brisbane, which the general public then buys to gain access to the hundreds of discounts and offers. My wife Raquel and I love it because there’s plenty of great savings to be made at plenty of different places, whether it’s our favourite restaurants, tickets for events, local takeaway, there seems to be voucher for everything! It’s also a great incentive for us to try new places as some of the offers are too good to refuse and we’re always keen to give something new a go.

This year we’ve been doing some work on the concept of vouchers in the electronic form, meaning a computerised version of a voucher.  The concept being that businesses can send vouchers directly to their customers using email, SMS, iPhones and of course the web. The advantage of producing vouchers in this format is twofold. The first being that companies can send vouchers to their known customers for a very minimal cost. The second advantage is that as world computing becomes more and more mobile, the vouchers are affectively always available on our mobile phone. This is a big one because how often do you forget to take a voucher with you or not even know a voucher was available.

Let me explain a couple of different scenarios to you….

You’re out shopping, you feel like a coffee, so you get out your mobile phone and send a text to our system indicating where you are and what voucher you’d like eg Cleveland Coffee. We then send you back a voucher in the form of an sms for a coffee shop just down the road which is buy one get one free.

Or…

You’re lucky enough to have an iPhone, and once again you’re out shopping. It’s getting closer to lunchtime and you feel yourself getting hungry. So you pop out your iPhone, start up the Voucher application and do a search for ‘lunch’. The Voucher app knows where you are based on the geo coordinates of your phone, so it then does a quick search of it’s voucher database and displays the list of Vouchers for nearby restaurants who do lunches. Cool huh?

If you’d like to get your hands on some of these vouchers, just go to http://www.ziptv.com.au/ZipSearch.php?zipword=voucher You should see all of the availble vouchers on ZipTV.